Case Study: Pearland Independent School District achieves AI-driven automated cybersecurity and rapid malware detection with HPE Aruba Networking

AI and automation address cybersecurity concerns

Pearland Independent School District, a large K‑12 system serving roughly 22,000 students across 23 campuses in Pearland, TX, needed to deliver fast, reliable Wi‑Fi while securing a growing population of BYOD and IoT devices with a lean IT team. The district’s challenge was to maintain district‑wide coverage and detect/respond to threats at the edge and inside the network without spending hours mining logs or adding headcount.

Pearland deployed Aruba solutions — IntroSpect for AI‑driven UEBA/NTA, ClearPass for policy-based access control, Aruba 510 Wi‑Fi 6 access points and 7040 controllers — to automate detection and enforcement. The result: malware discovery and isolation time shrank from weeks to minutes (a recent Emotet incident was contained in about 90 minutes), the IT team gained district‑wide visibility without manual log mining, and automated policies now support growing BYOD/IoT initiatives while freeing staff to focus on a Wi‑Fi 6 refresh and digital classroom projects.

Pearland Independent School District

Greg Bartay

Director of Technology